Family. We spend lifetimes breaking away from them, forging our own path, only to discover it leads back to the same place. This undercurrent has flowed through Pixar’s computer-animated films since John Lasseter’s 1995 Toy Story awakened the appetites of audiences used to a diet of 2-D fare –– which Hollywood thereafter relegated to the back burner. An unfortunate casualty of this technology-driven trend was 1999’s The Iron Giant. Directed by Brad Bird (who, at age 14, mentored under Milt Kahl, one of Disney’s legendary Nine Old Men), the mostly hand-drawn masterpiece lost enough money to shutter the fledgling Warner Bros. Feature Animation unit. Undeterred, Bird found his path leading him back to his Disney roots by way of Pixar, and he finally achieved critical and commercial success with 2004’s The Incredibles.

These days, Pixar practically prints money: Lasseter’s Cars raced to one of last year’s highest grosses, despite being Pixar’s first release to stall creatively. With Ratatouille, Pixar is back on track, and Bird is once again behind the wheel. The technical virtuosity may still dazzle, the visual wow factor trumping anything in Shrek’s third sit-com entry, but forget the epic spectacle of Bird’s last outing. The Incredibles was adventure writ large; now he’s telling an atypically small tale, one confined mostly to a single restaurant, and the results are no less thrilling.

Rémy (voiced by comedian Patton Oswalt) is a gourmand with a highly refined sense of smell. He’s also a rat. While his colony scamper on four limbs scavenging for compost, he lives a “secret life,” entering the forbidden interior of the French countryside cottage where they live behind the walls. “Doesn’t it bother you that we eat with the same hands we walk on all day long?”, Rémy asks, walking on two feet as his tubby brother Émile (Peter Sohn) follows him into the bungalow’s kitchen, nervously eyeing the elderly woman sleeping in front of a TV. On it, we see a program featuring Rémy’s hero, the late chef Auguste Gusteau (Brad Garret), who probably didn’t have rodents in mind when he famously proclaimed, “Anyone can cook.”

When the old crone awakens to rats in her spice rack, the colony must evacuate to a nearby river, a single shotgun blast separating Rémy from his clan. Whisked into a raging sewer, he emerges in Gusteau’s once-popular Paris restaurant, where he can’t resist salvaging a soup that’s been almost destroyed by Linguini (Lou Romano), the eatery’s clumsy new janitor. Of course, the patrons love the result, and Napoleonic chef Skinner (Ian Holm) demands that the “garbage boy” replicate the recipe –– or else. An unlikely Cyrano-like tale follows Linguini’s growing celebrity: he attracts the unwanted attention of Anton Ego (a wonderfully sanctimonious Peter O’Toole) –– the culinary critic who ruined Gusteau’s reputation –– while Rémy the “little chef” covertly toils beneath his toque.

Can Rémy retain his “human” creativity, even as he seeks to reunite with his kin? Will a suspicious Skinner expose Linguini as nothing more than a rat? Can Bird’s sensual soufflé avoid collapse? To borrow a line from the film, which includes an insightful look at the art of criticism: my compliments to the chef.

Armies of the light Maybe the trauma of another intractable war has sparked the movies’ recent interest in ’60s headliners.

Paul Schrader at the HFA "I'm not sure what happened to me," says Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst, one of the least reliable of the director's succession of unreliable narrators, in the film named for her.

Behind the scenes at Portland’s new movie-making facility If local moviemakers can’t depend on better financial incentives to foster the film industry in Maine — and they can’t, in this budget climate — they can at least focus on creating the infrastructure to support future endeavors.

Waved off Ah, Eurocinema, the blood and backbone of film culture as it grew from out of the Hollywood shadow in the post-war decades — the Godards, the Bergmans, the Antonionis, the bristling Hungarians, the mordant Poles, the café-dawdling French!

An idyll examined After 36 films and more than 40 years of filmmaking, Frederick Wiseman has probably come as close as any director to capturing this American life in all its breadth and nuance.

A Tale of Two Towns Charlestown was baptized in bloodshed. Yet this unique, fertile turf has been generally overlooked by Hollywood, which has preferred instead its old rival South Boston, the primary backdrop for Oscar winners Good Will Hunting and The Departed .

WOMEN WITH SWORDS: KING HU AND THE ART OF WUXIA | March 12, 2013 Decades before women took center stage in the one-two punch of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill , King Hu (1932-1997; the subject of a retrospective at the HFA) put swords in the hands of a soaring heroine in Come Drink with Me.

REVIEW: EMPEROR | March 12, 2013 Yes, Tommy Lee Jones plays the "supreme commander" of the US forces in this historical drama from Peter Webber ( Girl with a Pearl Earring ) that takes place after the Japanese surrender in World War II, and the Oscar winner puts in another towering performance.

REVIEW: 21 AND OVER | March 05, 2013 As one of the Asian stereotypes in this hit-or-(mostly)-miss comedy from writer/directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore says, "Fuck kids these days. Every one of you is drunk, stupid, and fat."

REVIEW: THE LAST EXORCISM PART II | March 06, 2013 Now that the shaky-cam nonsense has been left behind, what remains are textureless, overlit, sub-TV-quality visuals that only accentuate the fact that our protagonist, Nell Sweetzer (Ashley Bell), is at least a decade older than the 17-year-old exorcised sect-escapee that she's playing.

REVIEW: JACK THE GIANT SLAYER | March 06, 2013 Stop me if you've heard this one before: a farm boy dreams of adventure, finds it, and falls in love with a princess along the way. (For everyone's sake, let's just hope she's not his sister.)